Alzheimer’s ‘seeded’ like mad cow disease

ALZHEIMER’S disease and BSE appear to have a mechanism in common. As with BSE, it now seems that malformed proteins “seed” the formation of plaques in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s.

Although the exact causes of Alzheimer’s remain a mystery, plaques of a protein called beta-amyloid build up in the brains of people with the disease, and are toxic to nerve cells.

A team led by Lary Walker at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, took beta-amyloid from such plaques and injected it into the brains of young mice genetically engineered to develop plaques at about one year of age. …

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